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I live just a few blocks away, on Seventh Street between First Avenue and Avenue A, and I cover the distance quickly, making a brief stop on the way at a deli for a few cans of Diet Coke and some tea. Once I’ve reached my redbrick walk-up, I let myself in and climb the stairs to the fourth floor. As soon as I open the door to my apartment, Tuna, the calico rescue cat I was gifted three months ago by my half sister Nicky—who clearly thought I was desperate for companionship—scurries toward me and rubs her silky body back and forth against my calves a couple of times. I stoop down to stroke the top of her head, but a few seconds later she darts away and reassumes her perch on the back of the couch. Tuna often treats me like a roommate she was forced to recruit from Craigslist after her landlord doubled the rent.
After unloading my stuff, I dump a can of wet food into Tuna’s bowl, do my best to resuscitate a head of lettuce under a stream of cold water, and then make a salad with the lettuce, two hard-boiled eggs, a few cherry tomatoes, and some asparagus spears left over from last night’s dinner. Once I’ve splashed olive oil and vinegar onit, I carry it and a Diet Coke to the small wooden table at the end of my living room, grabbing my laptop on the way.
Once I’ve taken a few quick bites, I pull up the obit again, and this time I read it more closely. Christopher J. Whaley grew up in Scarsdale, it says, and attended Bowdoin College and the University of Michigan Law School. He was employed for the past fifteen years as a senior executive, not a lawyer, for the Delancey Pharmaceutical Company in Westchester County and in his spare time liked to sail and mountain climb. His survivors include his wife, Jane; a son, Mark, and daughter, Bee, both twenty—obviously fraternal twins—as well as a mother in Scarsdale and a brother residing in Buenos Aires.
The obit contains a link to the funeral home, and when I follow it, I find the same obit, though this one has a photo. The man in the shot appears to be in his late forties, so it must be recent. He’s attractive, with a strong nose, full mouth, and high cheekbones—and almost totally bald. I wait for a jolt of recognition, but none comes. It doesn’t help that his eyes are partially obscured by the black frames of his glasses, yet I’m pretty darn sure I’ve never seen him before.
I grab a pencil from the mug on my desk and jot down key words from the obit on a scrap of paper, hoping if I stare at them long enough, one will trigger a memory. The one person I know who went to Bowdoin is a girl from my high school in West Hartford whom I haven’t seen in years, and though I’ve met a few people who attended Michigan, they were undergrads, not law students. I have never set foot in Scarsdale or heard of the company Whaley worked for.
And even if I had a wide social circle, which I certainly don’t, I doubt it would’ve overlapped with his. Not only is he the type of guy I generally only cross paths with when I’m passing through the business-class section of an airplane on my way to economy, but he was eleven years older than me.
Next, I google “Scarsdale.” I’d been vaguely aware that it’s fancy, but I quickly learn that it’s apparently the richest town on the East Coast and second richest in the US—with an average household income of $450,000.Jeez.
A thought begins to gel. According to his lawyer, Christopher Whaley knew I was an artist. What if he’d been an art lover, even a collector, who decided to become a benefactor when he learned he was dying of cancer, leaving me and other artists financial gifts to help foster our work? It might mean as much as ten thousand dollars—maybe more. I mean, doesn’t stuff like that actually happen sometimes?
And it could really help me. I might finally be able to turn down some soul-crushing graphic design gigs and spend more time on my collages. It could also be a cushion to guarantee I’ve got the rent each month for my art studio, a space that might be tiny and shabby but has helped me kick-start my art career after an eight-year hiatus.
A small windfall could also allow me to spruce up my apartment. I moved in a decade ago, before the East Village was as trendy as it is today, and though my rent, thankfully, has stayed reasonable by Manhattan standards, it doesn’t allow me to evenbrowseon a home decor site like One Kings Lane. I’ve tried my best to make the place charming, using eclectic fabrics and displaying quirky flea market finds, like the painted wooden mushroom on top of my bookshelf and African stone bracelets hung along one wall. But everything’s been bought on the cheap, and it shows. What would it be like to set a drink on a side table made of wood instead of particleboard, paint the walls something other than the sad, flat white they came in, and light Diptyque candles in scents like “fig tree” or “feu de bois”? It would be fabulous, that’s what it would be.
But as much as I’d love to add some small luxuries to my life and have much more time for my art, there’s something I want to do with the money more than anything else: get pregnant.
For the past few years, I’ve had a case of baby fever that I’ve been unable to cool, even with rational thoughts like,This will be impossibly hard, andYou’re almost thirty-eight, so why don’t you just let it go. It’s not so severe that I have to take to my bed after seeing a woman with a baby bump, but being around infants and toddlers sets off a yearning in my heart that hurts as much as a hand slammed in a door. Maybe I’ve had no luck winning over a rescue cat, and maybe there are people who view me as gloomy, someone who never sees the glass half-full, but I know that I’d be a good mother. I’d love and cherish a baby, devote myself to his or her care, and though it would be brutal to be a single mom, it’d be worth it to me.
And unlike the grinch who stole Christmas, my heart won’t have to grow three sizes in one day to handle it. Because it’s big enough and always has been.
There are major hurdles, though. Lucas, the only guy I’ve actually loved in the past dozen years, is long gone (him:As much as I care, Skyler, it’s just too hard with you). Even if I had a malefriendwho I could strike a please-get-me-pregnant-and-you-won’t-have-to-do-a-damn-thing bargain with, I wouldn’t want to be tied to him even indirectly. This means that to make a baby, I have to go the insemination route using donor sperm.
Which is going to cost me a bundle. I’ve already had a consultation at the Dobson Fertility Clinic, a place I found after an online search, and where I learned that a single intrauterine insemination, IUI, procedure costs close to a thousand dollars. And it’s only about 10 percent effective in my age category, which means that if the first few attempts fail, I might have to seriously consider going with IVF, in-vitro fertilization, which is far more expensive.
And then there’s the cost of raising a baby in New York, a place I feel I need to be if I’m going to have any chance of making it as an artist. According to the research I’ve done, a baby will set me back over twenty grand the first year alone, and that only includesstuff like formula, food, diapers, medical expenses, and basic part-time childcare, not even extras like crib mobiles and Baby and Me classes. Because of my age, I have to actsoon, but there’s no way I can swing it financially right now.
All that could change in an instant with a gift of ten or, God, twenty grand.
I fish my phone out of my purse and tap my sister’s number. Maybe she can enlighten me a little.
“Hi, everything okay?” Nicky says, and I understand the anxiety in her voice. Despite our seven-year age gap, I don’t know what I’d do without my younger sister in my life, but she’s almost always the one who initiates our phone calls.
“Sorry to bother you on a Friday night,” I tell her, “but I have a weird question. Does the name Christopher Whaley mean anything to you?”
There’s a pause as she seems to rummage through her memory. “Gosh, no. Why?”
As soon as I tell her about the call from Kane, she’s full of her typical unbridled enthusiasm. “Oh my god, Sky, that’s incredible,” she says. I picture her blue eyes going wide and her fingers twirling a tendril of the long blond hair that frames her pretty, heart-shaped face. The idea of a scam has clearly not popped into that trusting brain of hers, which is no surprise. Unlike me, my half sister sees the world through rose-tinted glasses.
“And as far as you know, we don’t have any distant relatives with that last name?”
“Not on Mom’s side, I don’t think. But maybe on your dad’s?”
“Not from what I recall.”
“Mom might have an idea.”
“Since neither of us recognize the name, it’s probablynota relative,” I say, changing the subject, as my mother is the last person I cantalk to about this. “So I’ve been thinking it might be a guy who’s seen my art somewhere and wanted to support my career after he died.”
“Oh, wow, maybe.”
“I guess I won’t know any more until I show up at the lawyer’s office on Monday.... Wait,” I say, quickly mapping out the distance between Scarsdale and West Hartford, where Nicky and her husband live in a new house not far from my mother and stepfather, David. “Want to come with me? It would be about an hour-and-a-half drive for you—but I’ll buy lunch.”
As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I realize how stupid my request is. Nicky’s a full-time physician’s assistant who works nine to six during the week.
